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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

What was once the privilege of a few has become a middle-class entitlement, thanks mainly to government support. Some 3.5m Americans and 5m Europeans will graduate this summer.

In the emerging world universities are booming: China has added nearly 30m places in 20 years. Yet the business has changed little since Aristotle taught at the Athenian Lyceum: young students still gather at an appointed time and place to listen to the wisdom of scholars.

Now a revolution has begun (see "The future of universities: The digital degree"), thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university.

Off Campus, Online

Higher education suffers from Baumol's disease--the tendency of costs to soar in labour-intensive sectors with stagnant productivity. Whereas the prices of cars, computers and much else have fallen dramatically, universities, protected by public-sector funding and the premium employers place on degrees, have been able to charge ever more for the same service. For two decades the cost of going to college in America has risen by 1.6 percentage points more than inflation every year.

For most students university remains a great deal; by one count the boost to lifetime income from obtaining a college degree, in net-present-value terms, is as much as $590,000 (see page 74). But for an increasing number of students who have gone deep into debt--especially the 47% in America and 28% in Britain who do not complete their course--it is plainly not value for money. And the state's willingness to pick up the slack is declining. In America government funding per student fell by 27% between 2007 and 2012, while average tuition fees, adjusted for inflation, rose by 20%. In Britain tuition fees, close to zero two decades ago, can reach £9,000 ($15,000 a year).

The second driver of change is the labour market. In the standard model of higher education, people go to university in their 20s: a degree is an entry ticket to the professional classes. But automation is beginning to have the same effect on white-collar jobs as it has on blue-collar ones. According to a study from Oxford University, 47% of occupations are at risk of being automated in the next few decades. As innovation wipes out some jobs and changes others, people will need to top up their human capital throughout their lives.

By themselves, these two forces would be pushing change. A third--technology--ensures it. The internet, which has turned businesses from newspapers through music to book retailing upside down, will upend higher education. Now the MOOC, or "Massive Open Online Course", is offering students the chance to listen to star lecturers and get a degree for a fraction of the cost of attending a university.

MOOCs started in 2008; and, as often happens with disruptive technologies, they have so far failed to live up to their promise. Largely because there is no formal system of accreditation, drop-out rates have been high. But this is changing as private investors and existing universities are drawn in. One provider, Coursera, claims over 8m registered users. Though its courses are free, it bagged its first $1m in revenues last year after introducing the option to pay a fee of between $30 and $100 to have course results certified. Another, Udacity, has teamed up with AT&T and Georgia Tech to offer an online master's degree in computing, at less than a third of the cost of the traditional version. Harvard Business School will soon offer an online "pre-MBA" for $1,500. Starbucks has offered to help pay for its staff to take online degrees with Arizona State University.

MOOCs will disrupt different universities in different ways. Not all will suffer. Oxford and Harvard could benefit. Ambitious people will always want to go to the best universities to meet each other, and the digital economy tends to favour a few large operators. The big names will be able to sell their MOOCs around the world. But mediocre universities may suffer the fate of many newspapers. Were the market for higher education to perform in future as that for newspapers has done over the past decade or two, universities' revenues would fall by more than half, employment in the industry would drop by nearly 30% and more than 700 institutions would shut their doors. The rest would need to reinvent themselves to survive. Read More . . . . . . . . . .

By

How do you tell high school students they’re going to attend -- but not actually go to -- college?

It’s a conversation the University of Florida is having with potential students, parents and school counselors about UF Online, the institution’s degree-granting online arm. Now facing its first full academic year, UF Online is hitting its course development and enrollment targets, but it has so far attracted few first-time-in-college (FTIC) students.

UF Online launched in January with 583 students -- all of them transferring in. In March, university officials said they hoped to enroll 750 to 1,000 students by the fall semester, including 100 to 150 high school graduates starting as freshmen.

“We have not met that expectation,” said W. Andrew (Andy) McCollough, associate provost for teaching and technology at UF. “We have only recruited first-time-in-college students for the first time this fall, and we have a total of 22 out of a class of right about a thousand.”

McCollough, who has served as the interim executive director of UF Online since Elizabeth D. (Betty) Phillips’s sudden resignationtwo months after launch, said time constraints are largely to blame for the low number of first-time-in-college students. Ideally, the university should have marketed to those students last fall, but the institution was then racing to meet its legislature-imposed deadline to launch in January.

“I think a fairer test of the robustness of a fully comprehensive four-year baccalaureate degree for first-time-in-college students would be this time next year, because we are only now getting the opportunity to talk to next year’s class,” McCollough said. “We didn’t really crank [the marketing efforts] up until after applications were due for entry into the university for this fall. We’re up and running this time, and we’ve got not only the digital conversation that Pearson is assisting us with ... we’re also having feet on the ground with our enrollment management people.”

The delayed timeline for recruiting high school students at least means UF Online will have more time to develop the course and degree offerings it hopes will make it competitive. McCollough counted 10 majors (the website lists nine) and more than 130 courses in the fall lineup, saying the university will continue to add five new majors each year.

“I think we’ll be very close at the end of three years to 20 majors,” McCollough said. “One of the things that’s clear to us -- and should come as no surprise to us -- is as we talk to both transfer students and FTICs, we need to have a robust array of major opportunities to be attractive to these possible students.” Read More . . . . . . . . . . .

In 2012–13, there were 4,295 degree-granting institutions, including 2,609 4-year institutions offering programs at the bachelor's or higher degree level and 1,686 2-year institutions offering associate's degrees. These institutions may be governed by publicly appointed or elected officials, with major support from public funds (publicly controlled), or by privately elected or appointed officials, with major support from private sources (private control). All institutions in this analysis enroll first-year undergraduates. Private institutions may be operated on a nonprofit or for-profit basis. The number of private nonprofit institutions in 2012–13 (1,346) was 3 percent lower than in 2000–01 (1,383), and the number of public institutions in 2012–13 (1,581) was 4 percent lower than in 2000–01 (1,647). In contrast, the number of private for-profit institutions nearly doubled between 2000–01 and 2012–13 (from 687 to 1,368). Read More . . . . . . . . . .

Under the Patronage of

His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of Dubai Executive Council

Following in the footsteps of WEEF 2010 in Singapore and WEEF 2012 in Buenos Aries, the 2014 World Engineering Education Forum is bringing together a whole array of activities. The Forum combines a number of international engineering education conferences, and promises to be the largest ever conference on engineering education.

What does a Veteran or service member need to know when choosing a school?

What do agencies, congressional leaders and key stakeholders need to know about the effectiveness of educational benefit programs?

How do Veterans and service members perform in different educational programs?

Is there variability in outcomes across institutions for different types of students?

How do affordability and outcomes vary across institutions?

A set of outcome measures are proposed to capture important information on students’ experiences during school, upon completion of a degree or certificate, and post-graduation using existing administrative data. An additional set of outcome measures that require additional analysis and in some cases data from additional data systems have been identified for further exploration. The following chart lists each measure, with a brief definition of the measure, the cohort or population the measure describes, and an indication of the ability to report the measure. Click on the response for NCES under Departments reporting to see an example of existing data reported at the national level. Following the chart, there is a brief discussion of several overarching measurement issues that will help you understand some of the differences in available information from each of the three Departments.

12 tech trends Higher Education

Cannot afford to ignore

Higher education faces an onslaught of disruptive forces right now—and ​no one should be suprised to hear that news. Burgeoning technologies such as MOOCs and mobile devices are disrupting institutional structures from the classroom and across entire campuses. As tech transforms these learning environments, universities must decide whether to resist the change or get out in front of it. To choose the latter option, however, we need to envision what universities of the future will look like—​if they exist at all.

Lev Gonick, the VP for information technology services and CIO at Case Western Reserve University and CEO of OneCommunity, isn’t afraid of gazing into the proverbial crystal ball.

4 Technology Trends Changing Higher Education

Technology has had a huge impact on the education system worldwide, transforming how students learn, share and gather information.

The adoption of technologies like mobile apps, cloud computing and game-based learning has helped students be more productive. From being consumers, students are now becoming creators and innovators, thanks to technology’s ubiquity.
As universities continue to adopt new technology for higher education, here are some of the future learning trends to expect in the next few years:

Learning Analytics

The New Media Consortium (NMC) defines learning analytics as a “field associated with analysing patterns and trends from big data”. Its primary goal is to help educators develop educational programs to address a student’s needs. Tailor-fit lessons make it easier for teachers to teach effectively and students can now cope with their lessons.

The University of New England developed the Automated Wellness Engine or AWE. It was designed to identify students who were experiencing difficulty with their study programs. This enables the faculty to intervene and read more . . . . . . .

Trends for 2014: Five Factors Facing Private Higher Education

The Lawlor Group conducts extensive quantitative and qualitative research for independent college and university clients throughout the United States. Based on our recent findings, along with other primary and secondary research available to the general public, we’ve identified five trends in the higher education marketplace that we predict will have a significant impact on student recruitment and enrollment efforts during the coming year. We’ve also included several questions that college enrollment and marketing administrators should be asking about their institutions to test how well they are responding to these market trends.

TREND ONE: DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

Because of some key demographic projections, the recruitment of traditional-age college students will not get easier anytime soon.

College enrollments will grow more slowly. At private institutions, while undergraduate enrollment increased 38% over the past eight years, over the next eight years it will increase only 10% (NCES). [The black line shows average growth in the following chart.] Read More . . . . . . . . .

The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality. Here you will find lists of regional and national accrediting agencies recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education as reliable authorities concerning the quality of education or training offered by the institutions of higher education or higher education programs they accredit. Read More . . . . . . . .

What is accreditation?

Accreditation is the recognition that an institution maintains standards requisite for its graduates to

gain admission to other reputable institutions of higher learning or to achieve credentials for

professional practice. The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions

Frank is a social media journalist for the CDW family of technology magazinewebsites.

A lot has changed about the typical college experience over the past 30 years.

A new infographic from Flat World Education highlights the differences in college costs, student demographics and factors affecting work-life balance, among other features of college life, between college students of the 1980s and those of today.

Technology has helped foster growth in the education world, but it has also increased the workload. According to the infographic, two out of three college students today use a smartphone for school work — a capability that didn't exist even 10 years ago, let alone 30. The data also shows that 45 percent of today’s students will take at least one online course, whereas learning in the 1980s was confined to classrooms.

Take a trip back to the Reagan years and see how higher education has changed:Read More . . . . . .

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The AEFIS Team looks forward to using our Blog as a vehicle to:
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